Cecily Nowell-Smith, Reading Room Services Supervisor, writes: The Library and Archives at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew are very grateful to the Friends of the National Libraries for supporting the acquisition of this rare catalogue from Marianne North’s 1879 exhibition at 9 Conduit Street.
North’s capacity and energy was not limited to the vivacity of her botanical oil sketches. After her father’s death in 1869, she devoted herself to her great interests of travel, painting, and natural science. She crossed the globe with letters of introduction to a vast network of hosts, often British administrators, from Jamaica to New Zealand. Her return visits to Britain were no less active: she arranged an exhibition of her work at the then South Kensington Museum in 1877, then the Conduit Street exhibition in summer 1879.
Inspired by a comment in the Pall Mall Gazette review, she wrote within the week to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Director of Kew Gardens, suggesting that she fund the construction of a gallery at Kew for her ‘flower paintings’. ‘I should like very much to place them near their live neighbours’, she said, in this letter (held in our archives). The gallery opened within three years, in June 1882. A few years later, it was necessary to rearrange it: North had been to South Africa, Seychelles, and Chile, and had had an extension built to accommodate the new art.
North painted prodigiously, and the gallery’s permanent display represents a careful selection. RBG Kew has been able to develop a further collection of North’s works in oil, and the addition of this exhibition catalogue will support research into identifying the full scope of her oeuvre. The catalogue’s explanatory notes also demonstrate her educational intentions in exhibiting her art: in her memoir Recollections of a Happy Life, she writes of the care she took to include general information about the plants, as people were ‘in general woefully ignorant of natural history’.
Although North’s bold oils and rich depiction of context are atypical in a botanical illustration field dominated by individual watercolour plant portraits, her work continues to contribute to scientific discovery. The species Chassalia northiana that T.Y. Yu, first scientifically described and named in 2021, was depicted by North in her 1876 painting titled ‘Curious Plants from the Forest of Matang, Sarawak, Borneo’. It is very likely that this was exhibited at Conduit Street, under another name. With Friends of the Nations' Libraries’ support, we have a valuable new line of research into the work of this remarkable, redoubtable artist.
